Connecting the Privatized Dots

During the late 1990's, Canadian Naomi Klein labored in
relative obscurity as a newspaper columnist covering the
rise of anti-corporate activism. Sales for her book about
this burgeoning movement, No Logo: Taking Aim at the
Brand Bullies, were expected to be
modest. Then in November of
1999, protestors shut down a
meeting of the World Trade Organization
in Seattle, Washington.
Newscasters breathlessly wondered,
"Who is this new generation
of radicals? What do they
propose, and what are they
against?" A scant two months
later, No Logo hit bookstore
shelves, and quickly scaled the
bestseller lists.

Klein's follow up, Fences and
Windows, was disappointing. It
struck this reviewer as a collection
of disparate articles and essays,
cobbled together to capitalize
quickly on her initial success. But
with her third book, The Shock
Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster
Capitalism, Klein's many
strengths are once again in
evidence. A single narrative
connects familiar, but seemingly
unrelated topics (such as right
wing authoritarianism in Latin America, the resurgent
popularity of "free market" economics globally, and the
return of aggressive US militarism) in a manner that
illuminates their commonality.

Her thesis is that the "Chicago School" economics of
Milton Friedman have not only served as the ideological underpinnings of an anti-working-class offensive during
the era of globalization, but that Friedmanites (and even
Friedman himself) were physically on the scene for most of
capital's significant--and often bloodiest--assaults, from
Pinochet's brutal coup of the 1970's, to the World Bank's
subversion of Solidarity's electoral victory in Poland
during the 1980's, to Iraq of today. Policies that to the
casual observer may appear simply wrongheaded, or at
worst mean-spirited, from New Orleans to Sri Lanka to the
Middle East, are brought into focus as a deliberate course
of action whose goal is to reverse the gains of the 20th
century labor movement, and restore "free markets" to
their former iconic position.

The Friedmanite's efforts, of course, are loaded with
contradictions. Politicians under the sway of Chicago
School theory are as apt to embrace totalitarian regimes
that routinely torture, as electoral "democracies" supposedly
characteristic of a "free" society. Also, in the quest for
lucre, market religion is something to impose on communities
in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. It
was never intended to serve, and does not serve, to
constrain the actions of multinational corporations: these
giants manipulate markets with protectionist measures,
even as they insist that the wages of workers must be
allowed to freefall. As Klein ably illustrates, "freedom"-
-whether of markets or people--is simply a token buzz
word: the ultimate aim is profit.

The Shock Doctrine is not without problems. To begin
with, given the cost of the hardcover Metropolitan Books
edition, I expected a better job of editing: the anarchist
publisher AK Press routinely produces works with fewer
distracting typos and formatting errors. More significantly,
I found Klein's analogy between actual physical torture on
the one hand, and economic "shock therapy" on the other,
to be strained. (She posits that, just as an interrogator seeks
to wipe clean the slate of the subject's mind via means such
as sensory deprivation or electroshock, so Chicago School
economists look for societies in turmoil and crisis--the
social blank slate-- on which to conduct their experiments.)
The use of torture by government thugs and freelance
agents does appear to have increased during the epoch in
question, but causality between laissez faire economics and
this brutal practice, was not demonstrated to my satisfaction.
Finally, when Klein laments the lack of democracy on the global agenda, I suspect her of romanticizing elections,
rather than championing a directly democratic system of
community assemblies. (She is less than specific on this
point.)

Nevertheless, taken as a whole, the book is a useful tool
for understanding the world of today. In addition to
connecting the known in a logical manner, Klein's research
unearths new understandings: though I was aware that
mercenaries carry guns in Iraq, previously I had not
realized the extremes to which the making of war has been
privatized, encompassing food preparation and distribution,
automobile maintenance, ad infinitum in a dizzying
array of contracts financed from government coffers, and
bestowed upon wealthy players with the right connections.
For such details, and also for the overarching narrative,
progressives--even those who already have a revolutionary
perspective--will do well to peruse Klein's latest.

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